The Courage to Be Alive

One princess must press on through terrors and fears

The last time I remember being happy, truly happy, was when I was five years old. And even then, depression had infected the perfect world I should have occupied as such a small child.

Interacting with the world beyond my family drove home an ugly truth about life.

People are so cruel, and the average person is cruel in such a casual, banal way, that commenting on it, bringing it to light seems navel gazing, let alone having the nerve to reveal that you are hurt by it.

And yet, I am hurt by it.

I have observed my whole life that the persistent sadness that has plagued me for most of my existence is tied predominantly to people.

The way they have treated me.

The way they have spoken to me and about me.

The way they have harmed me, and encouraged others to harm me.

The way they have prevented or sabotaged or even twisted my attempts to defend myself.

But I think more than those actions that are tied directly to myself, what has hurt separately in its own strange way, is watching people do this to other people, again, and again, and again, and then observing the reaction of the wider society, which in its jubilant support for those who mete harm, makes the message clear:

Cruelty is power.

Cruel people are valued.

The more you harm others, and successfully get away with it, the more you will be accepted, adored, included, and defended.

No matter where I have lived, I have always seen this play out, but nowhere has it played out more strongly than when I was in boarding school, and then as an adult, in the wider Nigerian society at large.

It’s something that I suppose other people do not think about much, but perhaps due to my personality, being an only child, and thus always having had too much time to reflect, and too vast of an internal world, or circumstances where I have been on the receiving end, I have thought about this a lot for most of my life, and it drove me to so deep a despair, I have been trying to claw my way out of it for twenty years, and I still have no idea whether I’m any closer to breaking through to the surface.

I’ve tried all the things, and I already know that I didn’t try them hard enough, I didn’t stick with them long enough. I have heard every version of the advice to find some things that make you happy in life, and do them because the world is cruel and life is hard, but there isn’t anything.

There really isn’t.

The New Year Resolutions are still ongoing but…

Everything I once derived happiness from has faded for me.

I once was bubbly, cheerful, social, and excited to meet people and make friends, but so many betrayals and breathtaking callousness has left me wary of who I trust.

I once loved technology and took to the internet when it was new, mostly empty, but full of hope and promise. It was my escape from all the casual cruelty I had encountered in real life from people I had done nothing to, but in the blink of an eye, so many of those people have invaded the digital world too, and brought their horrors with them. A place that once felt like a refuge will never feel safe again.

Nigeria is so different now from the way it was when I was growing up, but the bad parts have stayed the same, and dare I say, getting worse.

People were unkind back then, and are much unkinder now.

People were shallow hypocrites back then, and now to make matters worse are performative in their hypocrisy to boot.

Nobody is guided by any true values, morals or principles despite how religious they all claim to be.

Integrity is a foreign concept in our society.

No matter what crimes you commit, no matter who you hurt or harm, no matter how egregious or horrific what you did was, friends, supporters, family, and well wishers will be yours as long as you find a way to cling for dear life to power and wealth.

The only true sin in Nigeria is to be weak, poor, and powerless.

For that crime, even those in the same boat as you will side with your oppressors to help grind you into the dust as a show of their loyalty, and to distance and differentiate themselves from you, lest they too become the next scapegoat.

I’m depressed by so many things, so I won’t try to recount, but perhaps suffice to say that in one corner, there’s the utterly bleak news every day about the country.

The way Senator Natasha Akpoti was unanimously bullied about Akpabio’s sexual harassment of her triggered me so badly. It brought back memories of not being believed, being labeled a liar, attention seeker, being dismissed and made a laughing stock, all while the abuser enjoyed so much open social support.

That’s probably why I didn’t devote a post to commenting on the issue as it was ongoing despite me following it very carefully and rooting for Senator Akpoti.

The endless mini massacres.

Every week, whole villages of people are being slaughtered and life just keeps ticking by as if they aren’t real people.

The way people just seek to one-up and humiliate other people as a way of boosting their own status while most of the country sinks even deeper into poverty and hardship.

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The final straw was OpenAI releasing the new image engine for ChatGPT which conjured up the Ghiblification of everything.

As an artist who never really gave it my all (no thanks to my fucked mental health), I understand very intimately how on one hand, technology can seem like a godsend to speed up work that by hand would take hours, days or even years.

On the other hand however, I also watched artists, even those I admired, struggle to get work commissioned from them. Having to deal with selfish, narcissistic so-called customers who wanted them to argue and justify why they should be paid for the work of their hands.

The general public has never wanted to pay artists, and I daresay the general public has always hated and envied artists because they have always believed that artistic mastery is a function of divinely graced talent, rather than just technique and hard work. They’ve used this idea to justify themselves not putting in the hard work to become good at art, and they have always resented having to pay those who did.

There is a disgust I felt watching millions of people gleefully ignore pleas to stop making Studio Ghibli rip-offs of their photos. Nobody cared that Hayao Miyazaki (the founder of Studio Ghibli) hates AI and prides himself on his hand drawn work. Nobody stopped to wonder how weird it was that until this moment, they had never paid an artist the same $20 they were paying OpenAI to draw them a stylised portrait of themselves if it brought them so much joy.

It’s sad that the same people would never have paid the same money to an actual artist to draw, but they were so happy to use technology that stole from artists and made it even more impossible for them to make a living from their work.

And I don’t sit on a high horse to say this.
I too tried the Ghibli thing once or twice, purely out of novelty and scepticism that it would actually work.

Me, ghiblified

But seeing people churn out these high volumes of images, and never once considering the people who made it possible filled me with disgust.

It’s forgotten now, but the day after the legendary Korean drawing artist, Kim Jung Gi died, some despicable wannabe AI bro fed all his known work into an AI system and had the guts to claim it was a homage to his passing.

The justification and normalisation of legal evil is sickening.

Everything seems shallow, unstable, and unreal, but perhaps what I’m really suffering from is some sort of existential heartbreak at how cold and indifferent they are to pain, suffering, and disillusionment working its way from person to person, and the banality of it all.

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What is the point of us being here?

None of the proffered explanations by your favourite religions make sense, whether the Abrahamic Cinematic Universe, or any of the others.

One thing that does feel designed though, is that if truly there is some supernatural being with some connection to this world, it certainly doesn’t care about us, and quite possibly, we are its source of entertainment, no matter how painful for us all we experience here may be.

Another thing that is just so bleak, is in conversations with people about topics to do with society, how much people reveal their utter lack of care for others. Everyone is on a mission to extract as much out of their relationships with other people as possible. Users are a dime a dozen but the scariest part is that no matter how you attempt to reason with them, they never agree that what they are doing is using people, manipulating people, engineering unfair power imbalances that allow them to benefit while the other person suffers and can never truly be comfortable.

Gaslighting is so commonplace, calling it gaslighting makes you look performative.

People will harm you and just flat out claim they don’t remember, or it never happened.

It makes me wonder if everyone is like this, and I’ve been stupid and naive my whole life.

Every conversation I’ve had about this has concluded that the solution is to just unplug from the world.

Forget about it.

It cannot be changed.

Get out of dodge.

But how do you get out when it feels like there’s nothing to get into.

Yes, I have formally diagnosed clinical depression, PTSD, and anxiety.

But this isn’t just feeling sad, it’s inability to feel happiness about anything.

When I was little, I read this book called The Kingdom of Kevin Malone.

The main character was a girl, so naturally I gravitated more towards her, but the story was about her adventures and travails in an imaginary world made up by this boy she knew in passing, named Kevin Malone.

In the real world he had been missing for years, but later it’s revealed that he retreated into this secret world of his own making, that could only be accessed by passing through certain arches in the park, because his real life in which his father abused him constantly was too horrible to bear.

I finally understand Kevin.

The world as I know it has felt too horrible to bear since I was a teenager.

My whole life, I’ve known the prophetic poem from The Kingdom of Kevin Malone, and recited some of it from time to time, as it’s resonated with me since I first read it as a seven year old girl.

A princess in mourning
A princess in gold
A princess with talents as yet to unfold

Shall join with the strength of a hero foretold
And win if their hearts be both tender and bold

One princess must press on through terrors and fears
And solve the great riddle of using the years

One princess must choose for a guide and a friend
A being she fears but will love in the end

One princess must bring from her distant home's heart
A magic more mighty than any smith's art

These three, imprisoned in walls made of stone
Pressed to the uttermost, bounded by bone

Using a weapon they already own
Can bring the prince worthily home to his throne

What I’ve always taken from it is to be brave in the face of overwhelmingly bad odds, to press on regardless of fear, and to find the strength within yourself to survive the great horror of life itself.

But I can’t lie…

I’m tired.

I want to be the person my eternally hopeful, eternally sunny, optimistic, bubbly, enthusiastic teenage self once was before I looked at the world too closely and saw all unseeable, and knew all unknowable.

If like the Ship of Theseus, I have become many new versions of myself in reaction to life itself but still seem the same to others, which one of those versions is really me?

I don’t know.

Nor would any of the various mes.

I want to go home.

But both in place and time, all homes I have ever known are now forever lost to me.

Were I to have a home, it would have to be one that I create somehow.

Adulthood is clinging for safety and sanity from moment to moment, hoping you will not lose your grip and plunge into a bottomless pit of despair as you leap to try to gather enough about you to make yourself feel secure in this uncertain world.

Or at least it has been for me.

The people I loved and clung to for safety turned out to be anything but.

Perhaps to people with siblings it doesn’t matter much because they will always have their family, but to I who has always been alone, each abandonment wrought a painful gully that marred my internal landscape.

Still, somewhere inside me, I am stubborn and undefeated, even as I feel defeated in this moment.

Inside, there is a me who says I must rise and fight for my happiness because it is the tax I will pay myself by taking it by force from this world that has tried relentlessly to end me and blot me out.

If I have recreated the happiness of my childhood once again by the time I die, then I have won.

Until then, that me says.

Don’t die.

Stand and fight for every future moment to surpass the pain of the past.

I’m scared, I’m exhausted, and I don’t know how says another me.

And yet, press on I must.

Love,

Lotanna